Travelers often require or desire the shipment of sporting goods, such as bicycles or golf clubs, by air or ground to a travel destination for use at that destination. The sporting goods are typically loaded into a hard-sided or soft-sided shipping container, which is then placed with other air or ground cargo and shipped to the travel destination. U.S. Pat. No. 5,520,280 to Lickton discloses an example of such a container especially suited for shipping bicycles.
Heretofore, containers for shipping sporting goods have suffered from one or more drawbacks. In the case of soft-sided containers, the container does not adequately protect its contents in abusive environments. The abuse imparted to the container during rough shipping and handling can damage its contents. In addition, manual transport of the loaded container can be fatiguing because the container typically lacks wheels to facilitate its transport. Therefore, unless the user has a separate cart or other means for moving the container, the user must manually lift and carry the container from one place to another. Also, due to the soft-sided nature of the container, it is not advisable to stack the container with other similar containers because of the damage that can result to its contents. Rather, it is common to haphazardly place the container in cargo without stacking or storing the container with other similar containers in a regular arrangement. Such haphazard storage of the container can promote abuse to the container during rough shipping and inefficient use of the storage space occupied by the cargo.
In the case of hard-sided containers, the container can be designed as in the aforementioned Lickton patent to minimize abuse to its contents and allow for easy manual transport and storage. Nonetheless, the present inventor has found that there is a need for a shipping container of the type disclosed in the Lickton patent, but with the additional advantage that the container is completely convertible between an erected form and a collapsed form. On the one hand, the container could be disposed in erected form when actually used to ship sporting goods. On the other hand, the container could be disposed in collapsed form when not in use, such as prior to being purchased or after being used to ship sporting goods. Prior to being purchased, it could be disposed in collapsed form to minimize the amount of space occupied at the point of sale. The efficient use of space can be of particular importance when the point of sale is an airport, where space is not readily available.